Parties on both sides of the debate are operating under the assumption that a UN peacekeeping force would be marginally less ineffective than the current African Union force in stopping the Arab Janjaweed militias' genocide against the black Africans of Darfur. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum and its sympathizers (including Ayman al-Zawahiri) have eagerly invoked Islam when arguing against the presence of non-Muslim and especially Western UN forces inside Sudan, but clearly the desire to continue the Arabization of northern Africa wins out when considering the mostly Muslim black population their militias are terrorizing. And the Arab League has stepped up as an active enabler.
From Reuters: "Arab call for UN delay on Darfur puzzles key envoy"
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A key U.N. Security Council member said on Monday he was puzzled by an Arab League request for an indefinite delay in a planned council meeting on the crisis in Darfur.
Ghanaian U.N. ambassador Nana Effah-Apenteng, the Security Council president for August, said he got a positive response when he asked the Arab League about the meeting last week.
"The initial response I had from the Arab League was that they were positive with respect to such a meeting. So if we do schedule the meeting, I expect the Arab League to participate," Effah-Apenteng said.
And if they don't, will their input be excluded in the future?
The Sudanese government, African Union and Organization of the Islamic Conference were also approached about the meeting, tentatively set for next Monday and intended to explore the way ahead in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, he said.
[...]
With U.N. officials warning of a deteriorating humanitarian situation, the United States and Britain want the council to quickly adopt a resolution clearing the way for the 7,000-strong African Union force now serving in Darfur to be replaced by a bigger and better equipped U.N. force.
But the Arab-dominated Sudanese government has so far refused to accept a U.N. force, and Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo asked the council on Sunday to postpone its planned meeting even before it was made public.
Sudanese Foreign Minister Lam Akol called on Arab nations to instead support a Sudanese plan, under which the Khartoum government would send 10,500 new government troops to Darfur.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has dismissed that plan as a way to avert the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers.
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Well of course they did. This was entirely predictable, except to the likes of Nicholas Kristof, who has made himself the great expert on, and professional media mourner of, and scold about, Darfur, but who has not a clue as to why the Arab Muslim attacks on non-Arab Muslims in Darfur is completely consonant with the notion of Jihad and of Islam as a vehicle, as it always has been, for Arab supremacist ideology. If Kristof were intelligent, and if he took the time to study a bit rather than to engage in mere reporting and then in the cheapest kind of analysis, he would realize that the Arabs who refuse to permit the Berbers to use their own language or preserve their own Berber culture (and only recently have the Berbers in Algeria achieved the right to speak their own Berber language, Tamizight, after years of protests and riots in Tizi-Ouzou and other places in the Kabyle), and who uttered not a syllable of protest at the massacre, by an Arab-run government directing an Arab army, to kill 182,000 Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign (named after a sura in the Qur'an, as every "battle" engaged in by Saddam Hussein, too-easily pigeonholed as a "secularist," was named after something in the Qur'an, or something in the history of early Islamic conquest.
Of course "our ally" Egypt, and all our other "allies," such as Jordan, now run by the son of the plucky little king, and of course all the other members of the Arab League (say, was Iraq's representative there? Does Iraq support this effort to delay any attempt to stop the Janjaweed -- you know, the Iraq "that loves freedom" and wants to join us to fight "the enemies of freedom" -- that Iraq?), will take the side of the Sudanese government. Good god, in killing non-Arabs, even if nominally Muslim (but really, the Arabs wonder, can any non-Arabs ever be quite the Muslims we are, given that it was to an Arab, and in the Arabic language, that the Revelation of Allah, final and perfect and perfectly recevied (unlike those distorted messages that those prior monotheists, those Christians and Jews, believed, exhibiting such base ingratitude), was given, to the Best of Peoples, the Arabs, or rather to the Perfect Man, Muhammad, an Arab.
Why should any good Muslim Arab care at all about the massacre of blacks in Darfur, Muslim or not. That wouldn't make sense. That would not accord with the spirit of Islam, the spirit of that Islam which justifies, and promotes, the linguistic, cultural, economic, and political imperialism of the most successful practitioners of imperialism in history - the Arabs.
Nicholas Kristof, who won a Pulitzer for his "impassioned" coverage -- a coverage that explains nothing because he undersands so very little -- of the Darfur massacres, is giving Tom Friedman, another misunderstander-of-everything, another permanent ignorer-of-Islam, who won his Pulitzer for his book "From Jerusalem to Beirut."
Each, in other words, was given a prize for work on the very subjects they cannot conceivably make sense of, because neither one knows a thing about Islam, and so far neither one gives any sign of wanting to seriously study both the doctrine and the history of Islamic conquest, or how it plays out in the Lesser Jihad against Israel that prompted that Israeli move into Beirut, and that prompts the Sudanese government's deep invovlement in the massacre of black Africans -- Muslim, shmuslim -- in Darfur.
They deserve each other, Friedman and Kristof. And they fit the temper, and low standards, of the times -- and The Times.